I am a novelist and screenwriter. New novel 'Good Girls Don't Die' out now!

An e-book is not a book

Yesterday the nominations for this year’s Emmy awards were announced. As the New York Times reported, Netflix and HBO each received more nominations than some of the long-established TV networks. Delivery platforms have changed. As a result, audiences are bingeing on long-running series, and TV drama is as good now as it’s ever been. I’ve not heard any screenwriter wax lyrical about the good old days when it was so much better to write for an audience who had remote controls and TV sets too heavy to lug from room to room.

No screenwriter has been harmed by the advent of subscription streaming services. Quite the opposite. So why do so many authors choose to be sniffy and uninformed about what new delivery platforms can do for them?

It’s not screenwriters who are competing with Netflix or HBO for viewers, it’s the traditional US networks. And it’s publishers, not authors, who are threatened by Amazon (whose own dominance of the download market is, in the US at least, beginning to slide).

The recently leaked New York Times Innovation Report pointed out how the Huffington Post is managing to get way more traction out of content created by the NYT than the paper is itself. The report pointed out that NYT staff – especially senior editorial staff – are digitally unengaged. I strongly suspect the same is true of most publishing houses. It reminds me of long-gone days when senior (male) CEOs thought they’d never have to use a computer because they had secretaries. How many people in publishing think they don’t need to know how an algorithm works because they employ some digital guy for that?

I buy and read hard-copy books all the time, but, as an author whose e-books hugely outsell my paperbacks, I’m liking e-books a lot. So I want to know why the big publishing houses left it to Tesco to set up a really bright and attractive online bookstore that, with its TV and movie counterpart, is a perfect one-stop-shop for all storied content? Why bookshops can’t attract those customers who want to read a book on a device designed by Jony Ive by adopting a design ethic closer to that of an Apple Store?

Netflix and HBO use dramas such as Game of Thrones or House of Cards to create and enhance their own brand identity. Why haven’t publishing conglomerates used their various imprints to create If-you-liked-that-then-you’ll-like-this digital brands (for crime or poetry, for instance) that readers can immediately identify with as go-to sites? Or maybe team up with a global brand such as the BBC to deliver books via the iPlayer? Why not?

The e-book is not a book. Amazon is not a bookshop. Its algorithms have absolutely nothing in common with the traditional business methods of the booktrade. The algorithm – how to feed it, how to read the data it produces, how to surf its waves – is how authors get their work in front of readers. We all of us need to know this shit.

Sure, there’s still a very big argument to be had over pricing so that writers can actually afford to write, but meanwhile there’s also a crying need for publishers to ramp up their digital engagement and to view the e-book not as a pale imitation of the real thing – a print copy – but as a separate concept. There’s a reason, after all, why iTunes didn’t call itself iRecords or iCDs.

In Marrakech once I watched the storytellers in the main square use snakes to attract their audience. Snakes, ink and paper, e-books, they’re all in the same business – finding people to tell stories to.